At the National Motor Freight Transport Association (NMFTA) cybersecurity conference in Long Beach, California — the only known freight-industry cybersecurity conference — day one's AI discussion warned that cybercriminals, not defenders, are getting the boost. James McQuiggan, advisory chief information security officer at Apparent Security, presented AI as a foe: deepfake voice-and-appearance theft, agentic AI scraping LinkedIn and company websites to build polished spearphishing for shippers, brokers and carriers, LLM-generated emails with the old telltale misspellings eliminated, and ransomware "fully leveraging AI"; he estimated a criminal can invest as much as US$100,000 on a deepfake campaign against a ransom in the millions, and flagged internally used "shadow AI" as a risk vector. Melanie Padron, vice president of strategic growth at IT Architeks, laid out a five-point battle plan — a named cybersecurity owner, an independent risk assessment, a rehearsed incident response plan, a full vendor access audit and a full backup restoration audit — and told the conference her firm is reviewing AI tools aimed at the shadow-AI problem. Erica Brigance (ArcBest) and Todd Florence (Estes Express, CIO during the carrier's October 2023 cyberattack) appeared on the opening panel, with Florence recalling customers responding "when we had our cyberattack". No incidents were reported from the conference itself.

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